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“For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them. But leftist activists do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs.” – Unabomber Manifesto To date, the Trump administration has been an absolute tragedy. It has been the acting out of emotions. There are no adults in the room. I’m not saying there would have been adults in the room with the Kamala regime either, but I had some hopes for positive change with the Trump tech-bro alliance and now they are gone. At least truths are being laid bare versus heads being buried in the sands of joy, but I think there was a much better way. For example, I don’t support America funding the war in Ukraine. But the way Zelensky was treated is just dumb. See the Unabomber quote above, between this and the Munich speech, Mr. JD Vance, I hope your emotional needs are being met (at the expense of the good will of our allies). It's the economy, stupid Regardless of anyone’s long-term objectives in the US, be they decoupling from China, bringing manufacturing to the US, bringing lifestyle improvements to US citizens; I think it’s unquestionable that uncertainty about the future was needlessly increased. And unless the uncertainty was the goal, I can’t figure out why things were done the way they were. And if the uncertainty was the goal…uhhh…is our government captured by Russian or Chinese agents? Because that’s who benefits. I don’t trust the news very much. I have no idea if the guy in the El Salavdor prison had a fair trial, if the students being deported are criminals, or even if they are being deported at all. It’s really hard and time consuming to get to the truth about any of these things. However, when markets crash. that is obviously real. With the news, there’s usually no way to trade on it being real or fake, there’s nobody to take the other side. But with big public markets, there’s very deep liquidity if you think they are priced wrong. In addition to the 10% the market is down, the dollar is also down 10%. Considering the market is priced in dollars, it’s closer to 20% down. And even worse on top of all of this, prices are going up due to the tariffs. Was crashing the economy the goal? A side-effect of a greater plan? Because given how this was executed, a 3-week old LLM could have told you shit was gonna crash. And it’s not going to bring manufacturing back. I have done manufacturing in America for years, and anyone with any experience could have told you that this wouldn’t work, manufacturing requires long term investment and long term investment requires stability. What was the real goal here? Elon, you need to reconcile with your daughter Andrew Callaghan did a good piece on Elon’s radicalization. I get it, we have all been there. For me it was Gamergate (which still has a terrible wikipedia page that doesn’t explain what it was). But this doesn’t have to be you forever. You are the closest thing to an adult in any room in America. When you compare America to China, it’s really more like comparing Elon to China. ULA is a little joke compared to CNSA. And look into what percent of US car exports are Teslas. The man is singlehandedly beating the rest of the US combined. If you want any hope of standing against China, your political coalition better include him. Elon has been pretty politically quiet lately. I’m sure he knew exactly what would happen with the tariffs, but he couldn’t stop them. I got fooled too, thought it could be different this time. But it’s no different from 2017. (btw, we are finally beating climate change thanks to cheap solar panels from China) I know the idea of PR is against a lot of what you believe in, but you need to heads down put together a large scale PR campaign, distance yourself from this train wreck, denounce stupid fake right wing conspiracy theories, reconcile with your daughter (from a reader of sci-fi and The Culture, is the trans thing that hard to understand?), resolve your stupid beef with OpenAI (we are all disappointed, but you don’t have a great track record for open source either), and start building a new political party. Pro large scale legal immigration, not a single illegal border crosser. Pro choice (within reason), and also pro gun (within reason). Inclusive and diverse, with an unwavering focus on merit. Anti crime, with an understanding that victimless crime is not crime. Expose higher education and the medical system to the free market (watch how fast prices fall) Free market and trade, but not an unregulated market. Markets require regulation to be free. It’s probably the only shot we have against China. The current Republicans and Democrats are just far too stupid; the Chinese are watching this tariff drama and laughing their asses off. Their plans are measured in centuries. America, do you want to be a protectionist backwater? If so, and all the thymos is gone, then there’s no place for me there. If this is really the way things are going, the only thing for anyone to do is leave. We’ll see how it shapes up in the next few years. But if the racists or the other racists are still running the show, we really are just cooked. Enjoy your handouts to black people and your handouts to white people in a poverty stricken shithole.
You know about Critical Race Theory, right? It says that if there’s an imbalance in, say, income between races, it must be due to discrimination. This is what wokism seems to be, and it’s moronic and false. The right wing has invented something equally stupid. Introducing Critical Trade Theory, stolen from this tweet. If there’s an imbalance in trade between countries, it must be due to unfair practices. (not due to the obvious, like one country is 10x richer than the other) There’s really only one way the trade deficits will go away, and that’s if trade goes to zero (or maybe if all these countries become richer than America). Same thing with the race deficits, no amount of “leg up” bullshit will change them. Why are all the politicians in America anti-growth anti-reality idiots who want to drive us into the poor house? The way this tariff shit is being done is another stupid form of anti-merit benefits to chosen groups of people, with a whole lot of grift to go along with it. Makes me just not want to play.
If you give some monkeys a slice of cucumber each, they are all pretty happy. Then you give one monkey a grape, and nobody is happy with their cucumber any more. They might even throw the slices back at the experimenter. He got a god damned grape this is bullshit I don’t want a cucumber anymore! Nobody was in absolute terms worse off, but that doesn’t prevent the monkeys from being upset. And this isn’t unique to monkeys, I see this same behavior on display when I hear about billionaires. It’s not about what I have, they got a grape. The tweet is here. What do you do about this? Of course, you can fire this women, but what percent of people in American society feel the same way? How much of this can you tolerate and still have a functioning society? What’s particularly absurd about the critique in the video is that it hasn’t been thought through very far. If that house and its friends stopped “ordering shit”, the company would stop making money and she wouldn’t have that job. There’s nothing preventing her from quitting today and getting the same outcome for herself. But of course, that isn’t what it’s about, because then somebody else would be delivering the packages. You see, that house got a grape. So how do we get through this? I’ll propose something, but it’s sort of horrible. Bring people to power based on this feeling. Let everyone indulge fully in their resentment. Kill the bourgeois. They got grapes, kill them all! Watch the situation not improve. Realize that this must be because there’s still counterrevolutionaries in the mix, still a few grapefuckers. Some billionaire is trying to hide his billions! Let the purge continue! And still, things are not improving. People are starving. The economy isn’t even tracked anymore. Things are bad. Millions are dead. The demoralization is complete. Starvation and real poverty are more powerful emotions than resentment. It was bad when people were getting grapes, but now there aren’t even cucumbers anymore. In the face of true poverty for all, the resentment fades. Society begins to heal. People are grateful to have food, they are grateful for what they have. Expectations are back in line with market value. You have another way to fix this? Cause this is what seems to happen in history, and it takes a generation. The demoralization is just beginning.
AMD is sending us the two MI300X boxes we asked for. They are in the mail. It took a bit, but AMD passed my cultural test. I now believe they aren’t going to shoot themselves in the foot on software, and if that’s true, there’s absolutely no reason they should be worth 1/16th of NVIDIA. CUDA isn’t really the moat people think it is, it was just an early ecosystem. tiny corp has a fully sovereign AMD stack, and soon we’ll port it to the MI300X. You won’t even have to use tinygrad proper, tinygrad has a torch frontend now. Either NVIDIA is super overvalued or AMD is undervalued. If the petaflop gets commoditized (tiny corp’s mission), the current situation doesn’t make any sense. The hardware is similar, AMD even got the double throughput Tensor Cores on RDNA4 (NVIDIA artificially halves this on their cards, soon they won’t be able to). I’m betting on AMD being undervalued, and that the demand for AI has barely started. With good software, the MI300X should outperform the H100. In for a quarter million. Long term. It can always dip short term, but check back in 5 years.
More in programming
Whether we like it or not, email is widely used to identify a person. Code sent to email is used as authentication and sometimes as authorisation for certain actions. I’m not comfortable with Google having such power over me, especially given the fact that they practically don’t have any support you can appeal to. If your Google account is blocked, that’s it. Maybe you know someone from Google and they can help you, but for most of us mortals that’s not an option.
I started writing this early last week but Real Life Stuff happened and now you're getting the first-draft late this week. Warning, unedited thoughts ahead! New Logic for Programmers release! v0.9 is out! This is a big release, with a new cover design, several rewritten chapters, online code samples and much more. See the full release notes at the changelog page, and get the book here! Write the cleverest code you possibly can There are millions of articles online about how programmers should not write "clever" code, and instead write simple, maintainable code that everybody understands. Sometimes the example of "clever" code looks like this (src): # Python p=n=1 exec("p*=n*n;n+=1;"*~-int(input())) print(p%n) This is code-golfing, the sport of writing the most concise code possible. Obviously you shouldn't run this in production for the same reason you shouldn't eat dinner off a Rembrandt. Other times the example looks like this: def is_prime(x): if x == 1: return True return all([x%n != 0 for n in range(2, x)] This is "clever" because it uses a single list comprehension, as opposed to a "simple" for loop. Yes, "list comprehensions are too clever" is something I've read in one of these articles. I've also talked to people who think that datatypes besides lists and hashmaps are too clever to use, that most optimizations are too clever to bother with, and even that functions and classes are too clever and code should be a linear script.1. Clever code is anything using features or domain concepts we don't understand. Something that seems unbearably clever to me might be utterly mundane for you, and vice versa. How do we make something utterly mundane? By using it and working at the boundaries of our skills. Almost everything I'm "good at" comes from banging my head against it more than is healthy. That suggests a really good reason to write clever code: it's an excellent form of purposeful practice. Writing clever code forces us to code outside of our comfort zone, developing our skills as software engineers. Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you [will get excellent debugging practice at exactly the right level required to push your skills as a software engineer] — Brian Kernighan, probably There are other benefits, too, but first let's kill the elephant in the room:2 Don't commit clever code I am proposing writing clever code as a means of practice. Being at work is a job with coworkers who will not appreciate if your code is too clever. Similarly, don't use too many innovative technologies. Don't put anything in production you are uncomfortable with. We can still responsibly write clever code at work, though: Solve a problem in both a simple and a clever way, and then only commit the simple way. This works well for small scale problems where trying the "clever way" only takes a few minutes. Write our personal tools cleverly. I'm a big believer of the idea that most programmers would benefit from writing more scripts and support code customized to their particular work environment. This is a great place to practice new techniques, languages, etc. If clever code is absolutely the best way to solve a problem, then commit it with extensive documentation explaining how it works and why it's preferable to simpler solutions. Bonus: this potentially helps the whole team upskill. Writing clever code... ...teaches simple solutions Usually, code that's called too clever composes several powerful features together — the "not a single list comprehension or function" people are the exception. Josh Comeau's "don't write clever code" article gives this example of "too clever": const extractDataFromResponse = (response) => { const [Component, props] = response; const resultsEntries = Object.entries({ Component, props }); const assignIfValueTruthy = (o, [k, v]) => (v ? { ...o, [k]: v } : o ); return resultsEntries.reduce(assignIfValueTruthy, {}); } What makes this "clever"? I count eight language features composed together: entries, argument unpacking, implicit objects, splats, ternaries, higher-order functions, and reductions. Would code that used only one or two of these features still be "clever"? I don't think so. These features exist for a reason, and oftentimes they make code simpler than not using them. We can, of course, learn these features one at a time. Writing the clever version (but not committing it) gives us practice with all eight at once and also with how they compose together. That knowledge comes in handy when we want to apply a single one of the ideas. I've recently had to do a bit of pandas for a project. Whenever I have to do a new analysis, I try to write it as a single chain of transformations, and then as a more balanced set of updates. ...helps us master concepts Even if the composite parts of a "clever" solution aren't by themselves useful, it still makes us better at the overall language, and that's inherently valuable. A few years ago I wrote Crimes with Python's Pattern Matching. It involves writing horrible code like this: from abc import ABC class NotIterable(ABC): @classmethod def __subclasshook__(cls, C): return not hasattr(C, "__iter__") def f(x): match x: case NotIterable(): print(f"{x} is not iterable") case _: print(f"{x} is iterable") if __name__ == "__main__": f(10) f("string") f([1, 2, 3]) This composes Python match statements, which are broadly useful, and abstract base classes, which are incredibly niche. But even if I never use ABCs in real production code, it helped me understand Python's match semantics and Method Resolution Order better. ...prepares us for necessity Sometimes the clever way is the only way. Maybe we need something faster than the simplest solution. Maybe we are working with constrained tools or frameworks that demand cleverness. Peter Norvig argued that design patterns compensate for missing language features. I'd argue that cleverness is another means of compensating: if our tools don't have an easy way to do something, we need to find a clever way. You see this a lot in formal methods like TLA+. Need to check a hyperproperty? Cast your state space to a directed graph. Need to compose ten specifications together? Combine refinements with state machines. Most difficult problems have a "clever" solution. The real problem is that clever solutions have a skill floor. If normal use of the tool is at difficult 3 out of 10, then basic clever solutions are at 5 out of 10, and it's hard to jump those two steps in the moment you need the cleverness. But if you've practiced with writing overly clever code, you're used to working at a 7 out of 10 level in short bursts, and then you can "drop down" to 5/10. I don't know if that makes too much sense, but I see it happen a lot in practice. ...builds comradery On a few occasions, after getting a pull request merged, I pulled the reviewer over and said "check out this horrible way of doing the same thing". I find that as long as people know they're not going to be subjected to a clever solution in production, they enjoy seeing it! Next week's newsletter will probably also be late, after that we should be back to a regular schedule for the rest of the summer. Mostly grad students outside of CS who have to write scripts to do research. And in more than one data scientist. I think it's correlated with using Jupyter. ↩ If I don't put this at the beginning, I'll get a bajillion responses like "your team will hate you" ↩
In mid-March we released a big bug fix update—elementary OS 8.0.1—and since then we’ve been hard at work on even more bug fixes and some new exciting features that I’m excited to share with you today! Read ahead to find out what we’ve released recently and what you can help us test in Early Access. Quick Settings Quick Settings has a new “Prevent Sleep” toggle Leo added a new “Prevent Sleep” toggle. This is useful when you’re giving a presentation or have a long-running background task where you want to temporarily avoid letting the computer go to sleep on its normal schedule. We also fixed a bug where the “Dark Mode” toggle would cancel the dark mode schedule when used. We now have proper schedule snoozing, so when you manually toggle Dark Mode on or off while using a timed or sunset-to-sunrise schedule, your schedule will resume on the next schedule change instead of being canceled completely. Vishal also fixed an issue that caused some apps to report being improperly closed on system shutdown or restart and on the lock screen we now show the “Suspend” button rather than the “Lock” button. System Settings Locale settings has a fresh layout thanks to Alain with its options aligned more cleanly and improved links to additional settings. Locale Settings has a more responsive design We’ve also added the phrase “about this device” as a search term for the System page and improved interface copy when a restart is required to finish installing updates based on your feedback. Plus, Stanisław improved stylus detection in Wacom settings preventing a crash when no stylus is found. AppCenter We now show a small label next to the download button for apps which contain in-app purchases. This is especially useful for easily identifying free-to-play games or alt stores like Steam or Heroic Games Launcher. AppCenter now shows when apps have in-app purchases Plus, we now reload app icons on-the-fly as their data is processed, thanks to Italo. That means you’ll no longer get occasionally stuck with an AppCenter which shows missing images for app’s who have taken a bit longer than usual to load. Get These Updates As always, pop open System Settings → System on elementary OS 8 and hit “Update All” to get these updates plus your regular security, bug fix, and translation updates. Or set up automatic updates and get a notification when updates are ready to install! Early Access Our development focus recently has been on some of the bigger features that will likely land for either elementary OS 8.1 or 9. We’ve got a new app, big changes to the design of our desktop itself, a whole lot of under-the-hood cleanup, and the return of some key system services thanks to a new open source project. Monitor We’re now shipping a System Monitor app by default By popular demand—and thanks to the hard work of Stanisław—we have a new system monitor app called “Monitor” shipping in Early Access. Monitor provides usage information for your processor, GPU, memory, storage, network, and currently running processes. You can optionally see system information in the panel with Monitor You can also optionally get a ton of glanceable information shown in the panel. There’s currently a lot of work happening to port Monitor to GTK4 and improve its functionality under the Secure Session, so make sure to report any issues you find! Multitasking The Dock is getting a workspace switcher Probably the biggest change to the Pantheon shell since its early inception, the Dock is getting a new workspace switcher! The workspace switcher works in a familiar way to the one you may have seen in the Multitasking View: Your currently open workspaces are represented as tiles with the icons of apps running on them; You can select a workspace to switch to it; You can drag-and-drop workspaces to rearrange them; And you can use the “+” button to create a new blank workspace. One new trick however is that selecting the workspace you’re already on will launch Multitasking View. The new workspace switcher makes it so much more accessible to multitask with just the mouse and get an overview of your workflows without having to first enter the Multitasking View. We’re really excited to hear what people think about it! You can close apps from Multitasking View by swiping up Another very satisfying feature for folks using touch input, you can now swipe up windows in the Multitasking View to close them. This is a really familiar gesture for those of us with Android and iOS devices and feels really natural for managing a big stack of windows without having to aim for a small “x” button. GTK4 Porting We’ve recently landed the port of Tasks to GTK4. So far that comes with a few fixes to tighten up its design, with much more possible in the future. Please make sure to help us test it thoroughly for any regressions! Tasks has a slightly tightened up design We’re also making great progress on porting the panel to GTK4. So far we have branches in review for Nightlight, Bluetooth, Datetime, and Network indicators. Power, Keyboard, and Quick Settings indicators all have in-progress branches. That leaves just Applications, Sound, and Notifications. So far these ports don’t come with major feature changes, but they do involve lots of cleaning up and modernizing of these code bases and in some cases fixing bugs! When the port is finished, we should see immediate performance gains and we’ll have a much better foundation for future releases. You can follow along with our progress porting everything to GTK4 in this GitHub Project. And More When you take a screenshot using keyboard shortcuts or by secondary-clicking an app’s window handle, we now send a notification letting you know that it was succesful and where to find the resulting image. Plus there’s a handy button that opens Files with your screenshot pre-selected. We’re also testing beaconDB as a replacement for Mozilla Location Services (MLS). If you’re not aware, we relied on MLS in previous versions of elementary OS to provide location information for devices that don’t have a GPS radio. Unfortunately Mozilla discontinued the service last June and we’ve been left without a replacement until now. Without these services, not only did maps and weather apps cease to function, but system features like automatic timezone detection and features that rely on sunset and sunrise times no longer work properly. beaconDB offers a drop-in replacement for MLS that uses Wireless networks, bluetooth devices, and cell towers to provide location data when requested. All of its data is crowd-sourced and opt-in and several distributions are now defaulting to using it as their location services data provider. I’ve set up a small sponsorship from elementary on Liberapay to support the project. If you can help support beaconDB either by sponsoring or providing stumbler data, I’d highly encourage you to do so! Sponsors At the moment we’re at 23% of our monthly funding goal and 336 Sponsors on GitHub! Shoutouts to everyone helping us reach our goals here. Your monthly sponsorship funds development and makes sure we have the resources we need to give you the best version of elementary OS we can! Monthly release candidate builds and daily Early Access builds are available to GitHub Sponsors from any tier! Beware that Early Access builds are not considered stable and you will encounter fresh issues when you run them. We’d really appreciate reporting any problems you encounter with the Feedback app or directly on GitHub.
Tracing how the CPU, OS, and ELF format shape the structure of your assembly code
I've been publishing at least one blog post every week on this blog for about 2.5 years. I kept it up even when I was very sick last year with Lyme disease. It's time for me to take a break and reset. This is the right time, because the world is very difficult for me to move through right now and I'm just burnt out. I need to focus my energy on things that give me energy and right now, that's not writing and that's not tech. I'll come back to this, and it might look a little different. This is my last post for at least a month. It might be longer, if I still need more time, but I won't return before the end of May. I know I need at least that long to heal, and I also need that time to focus on music. I plan to play a set at West Philly Porchfest, so this whole month I'll be prepping that set. If you want to follow along with my music, you can find it on my bandcamp (only one track, but I'll post demos of the others that I prepare for Porchfest as they come together). And if you want to reach out, my inbox is open. Be kind to yourself. Stay well, drink some water. See you in a while.
